Reassessment On Schedule Despite Problems

Allegheny County’s property reassessment process is on time, despite technical difficulties with electronic field equipment.

County Director of Administrative Services Tim Johnson says the County had planned to switch to an electronic system of indexing property data by now, but that didn’t happen as soon as was hoped.

In the meantime, reassessment workers will continue to use manual methods of reviewing property data in the current “pre-review” phase. Johnson says this segment of the reassessment is slated to end during the first quarter of next year, as he told Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick in a court-ordered update.

“At that time, we told the judge we were on target with our pre-review of properties. That’s the process by which we visit each property to verify that the information that we have on our computers, which is in part derived from information we receive from homeowners, is accurate,” says Johnson. “So we’re 75% complete with that phase.”

Johnson says after the pre-review process is finished, the County will move to the evaluation phase. Johnson says that’s when values are assigned to properties. The reassessment chief says the whole process will be finished by its scheduled date in January of 2012.